Texture compression issue

[caterinsforza]

Hello :]

 

I hope someone can help me out, here is the thing;

 

I open in photoshop the femalehead_msn from better females [sized 5MB], then I make make changes and save, but it comes out as a 1MB file [Five times smaller], and if I open it back to check, it gets slightly "pixelated" if I zoom in, so it seems to me it is saving itself as a compressed file and looses quality. It looks very bad in game.

 

I use the "DTX3 8 bpp Explicit alpha" setting to save.

 

I do not resize, In fact, just to be sure, I opened better females' _msn, made no changes, but then save it with my photoshop and i get the pixelated 1MB file.

 

If you know of a way to save it without loosing quality, or if something else is causing this, please let me know.

 

TIA

Edited June 21, 2012 by caterinsforza

[Poshpaws]

Have you tried saving as DXT5? This may give you better results for an _msn file. Also, you can try "save as" and choose uncompressed?

[Perraine]

Some people have 'un-compressed' .dds textures in there mods, this does away completely with the "compression artifacts" you describe but it positively kills your computer loading those massive files.

As mention above, and if you have a decent computer rig, save the files as dxt5 interpolated alpha with a resolution of 2048 x 2048 and you should pretty much remove the artifacts without bringing your system to it's knees.

[caterinsforza]

I tried dtx5 and compression tweaks with the nvidia dds plugin, to the same result; a pixelated compressed file.

 

But then I tried with GIMP and it has an option to save uncompressed DDS files. It indeed gave me the desired result.

 

Thank you for your help. :]